Comment by BWStearns
2 years ago
I work at a place that has ancestral Gooby code. It is truly horrific and an affront to whatever machine god (GPT-X?) may judge us in the future. The badness has literally nothing to do with the language. All the bad parts are due to the original team having reached for the most esoteric thing available at the time. I like playing with weird tech shit but there is a time and a place, and that place is not in prod for a startup.
They way overspent their strangeness budget[0] at every step of the stack. Even though I love (this) Gooby in general, in this case it has caused extreme damage to the organization.
I am still angry at the original devs for their choices because they basically poisoned the whole org against the language even though it would be useful for the org as a whole to adopt it in a non psychotic manner. It basically resulted in a reflexive ban for all Gooby in the future even when it might make sense.
[0] https://steveklabnik.com/writing/the-language-strangeness-bu...
I've personally seen this, it can be pure goddamn cancer.
The company hired a very smart charlatan and he convinced them to start a greenfield project in Haskell. Then they need to hire Haskell developers for this specific thing because everyone else only knows Java and Python. Nearly a year later they're barely getting started, but it's getting hyped like you couldn't believe. A lot of sprint planning time starts to become 'how do we start integrating [New thing]' because the Directors have been fluffing it so hard.
Anyway it never got used in prod. The development turned into a disaster and the original guy quit. The team got dismantled and the whole thing got memory-holed. Anyone in the org hearing the word "Haskell" would invariably just think about it lol
Not even sure these guys fit the standard mantle of language hyping charlatans. Most of the catastrophic choices were things you could do in any language. With the bonus of no meaningful comments and just committing to master so there's no PR comment history to help the future team's archeology project.